He asked Mr Mann whether that sounded about right and Mr Mann flippantly said, "I've never added it up."
Mr Vickery then asked whether it sounded like the amount was in the right ballpark, "over $30 million?" and Mr Mann said, "It is possible."
In addition to fraudulent studies, thirty million apparently buys a lot of publicity because news of Mr Mann's latest research was pumped out and accepted by just about every major media outlet in the US and Canada.
One headline by the Austin American-Statesmen and CBC News Canada, read: "Antidepressants Lower Kids' Suicide Risk, New Research Finds"
Another CBS News headline read: "Child Suicide: No Antidepressant Link?"
Reuters, News Max, Dominican Republic, and Scientific American all ran the headline:
"Antidepressants Tied to Lower Suicide Rates in Kids"
However, conspicuously missing in a google news search are any headlines disputing this unscientific study.
Dr David Healy, a professor at North Wales Department of Psychological Medicine, at Cardiff University, in the UK, will be testifying at the December 13, FDA hearing. He says there is little difference in the research on the suicidality risks associated with SSRIs with adults verses with children. "There is a striking overlap between the results in trials from adults and pediatric trials," he notes.
"While the rate of suicidal acts is higher in pediatric trials of depression," he explains, "the relationship between active treatment and placebo is the same in both adult and pediatric groups."
Dr Healy has authored 12 books on psychiatric drugs, including, "The Creation of Psychopharmacology," and "The Antidepressant Era," and he plans to testify about the manipulation of data from clinical trials on SSRIs. According to Dr Healy, "There is probably no other area of medicine in which the academic literature is so at odds with the raw data."
A possible explanation, he explains, is that the literature has had a significant ghostwriting input, a possibility that the ACNP Report, he says, that was published 10 days before the February 2004, hearing, did nothing to dispel.
"The Task Force," Dr Healy says, "reported SSRIs to be effective, safe and well-tolerated, but the authors claimed that they might be mistaken in that they had not seen the raw data."
Yet the some of authors of the report, he points out, including Graham Emslie and Karen Wagner, were also authors on almost all of the randomized trials on SSRIs, so Dr Healy questions how these people can claim that they have not seen the raw data.
"Science depends on access to, or a fair representation of, all of the data," he says.
"Portraying positive only results as science," he points out, "in other settings, has been called fraud."
I'm a retired psychologist who spent 30+ years in the practice of psychology here in the good ol' USofA; 10 years in community mental health centers and then Thank GOD ( or whoever is up there ); I escaped those insane-asylums- pretending- to-be-treatment- centers-while- reaping-hundreds -of-BILLIONS- of-tax-dollars- over-the- past-40-years and entered private practice in 1978.
Though it only took me about 10 minutes after I left graduate school in Fayetteville, Arkansas back in 1968; degrees in hand , to discover that 90% of mental health science is bogus; it was a few years later that I concluded that about 90% of its activity is destructive, dangerous and unconscionable and carried out by either sickos or sociopaths or idiots or, more likely, all the above.
The entire mental health effort began to be usurped by big pharma back in the 1950s when Miltown began to be universally prescribed as " moma's little helper " and quickly our mothers and grandmothers became addicted. Today, the progression from miltown to valium to tofranil to elevil to triavil to prozac to zoloft to paxil to..... has addicted a huge percentage of our population.. ..how else to explain the elections of idiots and crazies like Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1, ...and culminated by
the colossally inexplicable election of George Dumbya twice!?
The Prozac-Zoloft- Paxil-Devil-made-me-do-it scenario is the only viable answer to that enigma.
I was also present at the earliest dawning of the the most hideous mental health scam yet perpetrated:The biological explanation for all the woes of parenting challenges. An added bonus was also available as the biological explanation led to the gold mine and easy " sales pitch " that the problems of our kids lies not in the stars or poor parenting skills but in the synapses of the children. In fact the movement was birthed at the Child Study Center in Little Rock, Arkansas in the mid-1960s. Back then the condition of ADD to morph into ADHD was labeled MBD: Minimal Brain Dysfunction --- which, I suspect was a far too ominous label to market and thus quickly became the more palatable SLD industry-Specific Learning Disability. The obvious beauty of all this was it took the burden and ,better still, the guilt off the parents so they'd become much more willing to enter and stay with treatment of "their little darlings "; at least until the mental health insurance benefits were exhausted!
And....of course, The drug industry,Big Pharma, was quickly in hot pursuit of the riches accruing from pills to solve the synaptic misfires. Like bandits and desperados in search of a train, they rushedly pursued the scam likkety split!
Since all difficult children ( meaning male behavior mostly ) was now organic; it was only logical that medicine was the treatment of choice. Enter Tegretol! Tegretol is an anti-convulsant used to help control seizures and since the original diagnostic nonsense was called Minimal Brain Dysfunction; a drug related to treatment of actual brain dysfunction was an initial solution dreamed up by the idiots at Big Pharma,albeit administered at a lower level...but the idea suffered a minor glitch ...it didn't work.
NOT TO BE DISCOURAGED :
An unintended consequence of stimulants in children was noted along about this time. Pre-pubescent children exhibited a paradoxical reaction to stimulants in that it seemed to sedate them rather than excite them. Voilla!
" Let's give the antsy-pantsy kids some SPEED.....i. e. RITALIN (an amphetamine derivative ).The added benefit is the stuff is addictive and we can hook the little buggers in primary school and then have lifetime customers. My God it can't get any better than this " the Big Pharma criminals must have gleefully exclaimed!
Now more than thirty years later we are experiencing an epidemic of Crystal Methamphetamine addiction running amuck in the USofA. Duh....suppose there's a connection between decades of state/education sponsored Ritalin abuse and our societal ills of the speed-freak generation?Before parents of the rare child who actually might truly benefit from stimulants begin screaming like gut shot panthers, please note I did occassionally bump into a child with demonstable ADHD......I repeat.....I did OCCASSIONALLY BUMP INTO AN AUTHENTIC CASE and in that rare case all bets were off.
As if the mental health/prescription drug pushers could not have become vile, rest easy ye of little faith. The bastards are now practicing a method called, 'Drug Cocktailing'. The current crop of criminals calling themselves psychiatrists now prescibe multiple psychoactive drugs to individual children, thus annihilating said child's childhood. This latest PROFOUNDLY TOXIC MENTAL HEALTH MOVEMENT and the Bushevik's Teen Screen Movement are but modern abominations which could only be dreamed up by the ilk of a Gonzales, an Ashcroft, a Rumsfeld.... yeah the same Rumsfeld who has become filthy rich peddling his artificial sweeteners uh,.. poisons... such as aspartame( Nutrasweet) to generations of victims.
If one wishes to look for causes of our childrens ills that are organic, how about examining the primary poisons our children ingest....sucrose, aspartame, transfats,Pschoactive Prescription Drugs!
by
Roy Murtishaw (11 articles, 0 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 78 comments)
on Thursday, December 7, 2006 at 1:43:58 PM
